Iran Press/ America: New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Venezuela, and Uruguay have each urged precaution for travelers when visiting the US, due in large part to gun violence.
In the first weekend of May, eight people were shot and killed at a busy Dallas-area mall after a 33-year-old gunman opened fire, wounding at least seven others before he was fatally shot by police. The previous weekend in Oklahoma, a convicted sex offender shot and killed his wife, her three children, and two of their friends before he killed himself, according to police. And just two days prior to that, a man shot and killed five neighbors, including a 9-year-old boy, after the family asked him to stop firing rounds in the air as a baby tried to sleep. The suspected shooter was arrested after a manhunt that lasted several days.
There have been more than 200 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, not including the shooter. Though mass shooting numbers fell slightly in 2022, since 2018 mass shootings have gone up by nearly 100 each year. In fact, in each of the last three years, there have been more than 600 mass shootings in the US, or about two each day.
The threat of gun violence in conjunction with the perceived lack of security within the US is increasingly seen as a safety concern by both American citizens and would-be tourists.
The 2022 Global Peace Index, which measures the peacefulness of countries and is made up of 23 quantitative and qualitative indicators, ranks the U.S. 129th out of 163 countries, just above Brazil.
Pew Research Center found that the gun death rate in the US in 2021 was 14.6 per 100,000 people — a figure much higher than in the majority of developed nations, according to a 2018 study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
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